Visual Skills: Peripheral Awareness

We’ve talked about eye movements in the past, and now we’re going to talk about one of my favorite topics: peripheral awareness, which is the ability to maintain awareness of everything going on around you. Your peripheral vision might be perfectly normal, but if you don’t possess good peripheral awareness, you just might be missing something important.

Hard vs. Soft Focus

Try this: find something to look at (a light switch, a doorknob – something that is not very large) across the room, and concentrate on it as hard as you can. After several seconds, you might begin to feel that the surrounding room is disappearing, and you’re seeing just that one object. We call this a hard focus, and it involves seeing a small part of our visual field with great detail and attention. It’s a skill that comes pretty naturally.

If you’re watching a lacrosse game, and concentrating on the ball carrier, you might find yourself less aware of where all the other players are on the field. Or if you’re on the field, and concentrating on one player, you might have less awareness of your surroundings – teammates and opponents around you.

Now try this: look across the room, but not at any point in particular. Let your eyes relax, and try to see the entire room without having to move your eyes. After a few seconds, you will probably notice more of the walls, ceiling and floor. This is a soft focus, and it allows us to have greater awareness of our surroundings – in other words, peripheral awareness. We each might have this ability, but it needs to be developed through practice.

Overall, the soft focus is a more relaxed way of seeing, and hard focus is more intense. Under stress (such as the final few minutes of a close, hard-fought lax game), we tend to lose awareness of our surroundings, and lapse into a kind of stress-induced tunnel vision. To perform best in lacrosse, we need to be able to maintain peripheral awareness as well as focused attention.

The earliest reference I could find on the idea of hard and soft focus comes from the martial art aikido, and a nice summary can be found at http://seeinganew.tripod.com/id21.html. And of course, we can take these concepts, and apply them to lacrosse. The result is an improvement in performance.

Examples From Lacrosse

Peripheral awareness is vital in all positions of lacrosse, as you maintain awareness of other players on the field while trying to accomplish the specific play you’re making at the time.

But, having worked with several lacrosse goalies (and finding lacrosse goaltending to be one of the most fascinating positions in all of sports, from the perspective of a vision trainer), I will give an example using goaltending.

As you follow a ball carrier moving towards you, you might want to be using a hard focus on the ball carrier’s stick, and even focus on the ball in the pocket. If you don’t maintain awareness of what’s going on around you, you might miss the attackman coming in from the far side, getting ready to receive a quick feed from the ball carrier, and tucking it into the corner. If you had maintained peripheral awareness, you would have seen the other player coming in from the side, and might have had greater chance to make the save, or even be aware that the ball carrier had the choice of shooting or passing to the player off to your side.

If you watch lacrosse games, you will often see a ball carrier appear to be making a shot, but instead passing to a teammate on the far side, who then has an easy time of tucking the ball behind the goalie.

Or, for you position players, you might remember being so focused on making a pass or a shot, that you got flattened by a defender you never saw coming in from the side. There’s a reason we call that getting “blindsided” but with greater peripheral awareness, you can avoid these situations.

Practice, Practice, Practice

“Okay, you’ve given me an idea of peripheral awareness, but how can I develop it?” Well, the answer is pretty simple. In Sports Vision Training, we have equipment that we use to train PA, but here are some things you can do, with no equipment at all.

Practice looking across the room “without looking at anything in particular.” At first your eyes will want to settle on specific objects, but work towards not allowing this to happen, while keeping the eyes fairly still, and going into a more relaxed state.

While watching TV, begin to see the other parts of the room, while keeping your eyes on the television. Become aware of the floor, ceiling, walls, furniture, objects on the walls, etc. Practice switching from a soft focus (seeing the whole room) to a hard focus on the television. See if you can maintain focus on the screen while being aware of the rest of the room.

One of my favorites: while watching a lax game, focus on the ball carrier, and try to maintain awareness of all of the other players on the field.

In Summary

We have the ability to direct our vision to small areas of our visual field, or to see “the whole picture” at the same time. As you learn and practice this skill, you will find it helpful in your game.
If you have questions you would like answered in this column, please send them to me at one of the email addresses below.

Hard Focus - Here I’m trying to simulate the two types of focus with photo effects. The player with the ball can concentrate on his teammate behind the net, but with a hard focus, he can lose awareness of an open corner of the net, as well as an oncoming defender

Soft Focus - Utilizing greater peripheral awareness through soft focus, the ball carrier has greater awareness of three vital areas of his visual field: the teammate, the open corner, and the defender coming in from the side. During an actual game situation, you will need both types of focus. In this example, the ball carrier will make an eye movement (and a brief hard focus) directly toward wherever he chooses to go with the ball.

Dr. Robert Buonfiglio “Dr. B.” is an optometrist in the Boston area, working - along with optician and coach Gary Kalloch - in the area of Sports Vision: the testing and training of the visual skills of athletes, with the goal of improving on-field performance. They have participated in lacrosse goalie clinics with lax-school.com, under the direction of former Boston Cannons head coach Bill Daye. Dr. B can be reached at r.buonfiglio@comcast.net or info@eyeonperformance.net. The website for Eye on Performance is www.eyeonperformance.net.